Fear of Sucking: Writing it Down

Ahhh, procrastination, my old friend. I'm sitting down at 11:59pm to work on one of my other goals this year: write something everyday. So with a minute to go, I'm finally making myself sit down and squeeze in something productive on this front. I wish I could say I'm so overwhelmed with things I have to accomplish that preclude me giving this particular resolution the time it needs, but this journey is about honesty...I futzed, I delayed, and finally with the clock clicking down, I crammed. Now let's really get down and expose the dirty here...I even considered altering the posting time. But I say NO! Say it loud, say it prroo...ok, shamefully, I'm a big fat time waster...especially when I'm afraid of something.

What am I afraid of? Well...I'm afraid it will stink. I'm afraid of what you'll think.

Let me explain. As a reader you can judge this for yourself (and I'm bracing myself to duck), but for most of my life I have generally been regarded as a better than average writer. I won the competitions, I earned the high marks. My eighth grade graduation from my small rural school was an embarrassment of accolades that I'm sure did not endear me to my peers. My artistic ego has stretched luxuriously, like a cat in the sun, with each admiring compliment. Oh it's heady, I'm not going to lie. Along with those compliments also came the expectation, expressed and unsaid that I was "going somewhere" with this little gift. Except, um nope, not so much. Why? Well, I could tell you I had to do some serious soul searching to figure it out, but no I know exactly why I haven't broken through. I don't have a discipline problem, because when engaged by what I'm doing, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone with more singular focus. The problem is...fear. Fear that it will not be good enough.

Oh the cliches just keep rolling! I'm a writer who is insecure and afraid of failure. I promised myself absolute honesty, but oooff, that hurts to type out loud. Well then, we're in it, let's keep it rolling. I have also always struggled with the unseemly need to be liked. Now the reasons for THAT are something that has required a lot of soul searching, and the quest to figure out and defuse that particular self destructive time bomb continues.

But ultimately, it's all about fear. It's a problem, and I'm not sure it can be solved so much as diverted through a bit of skilled rewiring. So here I go tinkering with the wiring:

• Macro Goal: Tackle Fear
• Micro Goal: Write something everyday, even if it stinks. And...and this is going to be the clincher...not for you, dear reader, but for myself.

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